IOHK | Latvia. Executive update
19 October 2016 3 mins read
For some of the IOHK team it was their first time meeting in person when we gathered in Latvia this month for an intensive working session to push forward several of our key projects. As a distributed company we usually collaborate remotely, across time zones, so coming together to exchange ideas was inspiring. For two weeks in the beautiful capital city of Riga, we advanced…
A major technical challenge of the cryptocurrencies is to find a way to safely increase the throughput of the system in terms of number of transactions. An approach to tackle this limitation is to review the role of the blockchain, or even to take that data structure out of the picture completely. In this post, we will comment a paper by Boyen, Carr and Haines named Blockchain…
Log-Structured-Merge trees (LSMT) are a good fit for modern SSD storage and offer good performance and reliability. LSMT are also a good fit for blockchain storage requirements (snapshots, consistency, proof of existence). This blog post describes a database designed specifically for blockchain storage, inspired by existing LSMT implementations (RocksDB, COLA tree).
The current state-of-the-art LSMT implementation is probably RocksDB, with in-memory write buffers, parallel compaction and snapshots. Another similar algorithm are COLA tree. That is a btree-like structure where each node has separate write buffer. Finally there is SSTable from Cassandra…
This post tries to give a short overview of provable security in cryptocurrencies.
Provable Security
Provable security is a relatively new area within the cryptography discipline. The first papers in the modern cryptography (the one that starts from the seventies until now) do not have a rigorous security analysis. That is, with the exception of citation of concrete attacks, there is no attempt to meticulously formalize the adversary power and capabilities.For example, the paper "New Directions in Cryptography" by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, which is considered by most the beginning of modern cryptography (at least the public and civilian one), does not provide such rigorous analysis.
The publications from the cryptographic research…
Bernardo, the presenter, divided the talk in two parts: the first reviews main topics in Cryptography which would help the viewer to understand the presentation and the protocol itself. Whereas the second is about the protocol itself.
First Part - Cryptography background
- Commitments
- Coin Tossing/Guaranteed Output Delivery
- Verifiable Secret Sharing
Second Part - Proof-of-Stake…
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